How to Choose an SEO Agency: 12 Questions

Google publishes the questions to ask an SEO and the warning signs to walk away from, and almost no agency-selection article links to it. That page is the most useful document in this purchase, because it means you are not weighing one agency's opinion against another's — you are holding the search engine's own published position while someone tries to sell you work on it.

This guide walks through Google's list, adds the four questions it does not include, and says what a fair answer sounds like. We are an SEO agency, so read the last section as the test applied to us too.

Google's own list

Google's guidance on hiring an SEO, last updated 5 June 2026, tells you to ask:

• "Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?"
• "Do you follow the Google Search Essentials (previously known as Webmaster Guidelines)?"
• "What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe?"
• "What's your experience in my industry?"
• "What's your experience in my country/city?"
• "What's your experience developing international sites?"
• "How long have you been in business?"
• "How can I expect to communicate with you?"

Eight questions, none of them clever, all of them answerable in a first call. What makes them useful is not the questions but the fact that they are Google's. An agency that bristles at being asked whether it follows Search Essentials has told you something in the first ten minutes.

The item on that page everyone skips

Buried below the questions is the most concrete piece of advice in the document, and it is about access rather than strategy:

"only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don't grant them write access)."

Write access is not a formality. It lets an agency submit removal requests, change settings, and file disavow files that tell Google to ignore links to your site. None of that is required to produce an audit or a plan, and all of it is hard to unwind if the relationship ends badly.

Google adds the same principle for server access: "If an SEO has FTP access to your server, they should be willing to explain all the changes they are making." The pattern across both is the one to carry into the negotiation — access is granted in stages, in exchange for work you have seen.

The risk that lands on your domain, not theirs

The part of this decision that is usually left vague is who carries the consequences when an agency uses tactics Google prohibits. The answer is not ambiguous. The links point at your domain and the pages sit on your site, so Google's spam policies, updated 28 August 2026, apply to you.

Four definitions from that page are worth knowing by name before you sign anything, because they describe what a large part of the cheap end of this market actually sells:

• Link spam — "the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings." Google's examples include buying or selling links for ranking purposes, excessive link exchanges, advertorials with paid links and optimised anchor text, low-quality directory links, and widely distributed footer or template links.
• Site reputation abuse — "third-party content published on a host site mainly because of that host's ranking signals, where the goal is for content to rank better than it could independently." This is the mechanism behind rented subfolders and sponsored sections on news sites.
• Scaled content abuse — "many pages generated primarily to manipulate search rankings and not help users, typically creating large amounts of unoriginal content providing little to no value." Google names using AI tools to generate many pages as an example.
• Expired domain abuse — "expired domain names purchased and repurposed primarily to manipulate search rankings by hosting low-value content."

If a proposal includes a monthly number of links, ask where they come from and match the answer against that first definition — we went through both halves of that market separately. If it includes a monthly number of articles with no named author and no research, match it against the third. We wrote separately about what actually holds up in our SEO guide.

The four questions Google does not ask

Google's list is about competence and honesty. These four are about whether the engagement will produce anything you can verify.

1. What will you show me every month, and where does the number come from?

This is the question we would keep if we could only keep one. There are two kinds of answer. One traces back to a source you own — Search Console impressions, clicks and queries; analytics sessions and conversions; the specific URLs that changed. The other is a proprietary "visibility score" or "SEO score" from a tool. Those scores are a vendor's model of the web, computed against the vendor's own keyword index. They are useful internally and they are not a measurement of your business. A report that consists mainly of one tells you how a vendor's index moved.

2. What would make you tell us to stop?

Every honest engagement has a condition under which more SEO is the wrong spend — a product with no demand behind it, a market where the search results are all marketplaces, a site that needs a rebuild before it needs keywords. An agency that cannot name one has not considered the possibility.

3. Who is actually doing the work, and can I meet them?

The gap between the person who sells and the person who executes is where most disappointment lives. Ask for the name, the role and the time commitment, and ask it early enough that the answer is not retrofitted.

4. What happens to the work if we leave?

Content, documentation, tracking configuration and access should be yours — and if the agency is in another country, so should the contract clauses that decide it. Ask whether the articles are published on your domain, whether the reports and audits are handed over, and whether any tooling that stops working on the last day is holding something together.

What a fair answer sounds like

Take question three from Google's list — expected results and timeframe. A weak answer gives one number for everything. A fair answer separates two different kinds of work:

Fixing something broken can move quickly, because it removes a blocker rather than building an asset. Pages that were not indexable becoming indexable, a template that stopped emitting canonical tags, a migration that lost its redirects — those can show up within weeks.

Building something new is measured in quarters. New content has to be crawled, evaluated and accumulate signals, and there is no version of that which takes three weeks. An agency that promises quarterly outcomes on a monthly retainer is describing the second and charging like the first.

The same split applies to the results question generally. Ask what the plan does in the first month if the answer to "what is broken" turns out to be "nothing".

Turning this on us

We are the thing this article is about, so here is where our answers sit.

We start with read-only Search Console access and ask for nothing else until we have delivered an audit. We do not buy links, and we say plainly that link building as a purchased monthly quantity is the tactic most likely to put your domain on the wrong side of the policy quoted above. We report from Search Console and your analytics, not from a visibility index, and we will tell you when the honest reading of a month is that nothing moved.

We also decline work. If your search results are dominated by marketplaces and your margin cannot support the fight, or if your site needs to be rebuilt before it can be optimised, that is what we will say — and in the second case we would rather quote you the website build than a retainer that cannot work on top of it. Our SEO services page sets out what a normal engagement contains.

The 12 questions, in order

1. Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
2. Do you follow the Google Search Essentials?
3. What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe?
4. What's your experience in my industry?
5. What's your experience in my country or city?
6. What's your experience developing international sites?
7. How long have you been in business?
8. How can I expect to communicate with you?
9. What will you show me every month, and where does that number come from?
10. What would make you tell us to stop?
11. Who is actually doing the work, and can I meet them?
12. What happens to the work if we leave?

Walk away from a guarantee of rankings, a claim of a special relationship with Google, and an unwillingness to explain what will be done — all three are named on Google's own page. If you want the same questions answered by us in writing before you commit to anything, send us your site and we will answer them against what we actually find on it. If the agency you need also covers design and build, how to choose a digital agency asks the same questions on that side. Where the numbers in those quotes come from is unpacked in SEO pricing. What a realistic timeline looks like is covered in how long SEO takes.